Perhaps
it was the overtly sexual use of the word in “High Windows” that made it seem
gratuitous and discordant. In “This Be the Verse,” “fuck” is playing its familiar,
all-purpose role in modern English. I’ve lived with “High Windows” for forty
years and finally have come to terms with Larkin’s use of the word. He changes
the poem’s diction and tone subtly across five stanzas. At first he’s glib and
colloquial. Not a word in the opening stanza would be unfamiliar to “a couple
of kids” today, except possibly “diaphragm” (or “paradise”). Is this the
leering of a dirty old man? Is Philip Larkin writing a poem of envy about the
newly liberated youth of the nineteen-sixties? Not quite. There’s a sad knowingness
in that slide between stanzas: “everyone young going down the long slide / To
happiness, endlessly.” Like a ventriloquist, Larkin then puts words in the
mouth of a middle-aged man envying the speaker’s younger self – words that
surely were never uttered. At last, in the final stanza, the rhythm and diction
grow up and take on the tone of an older, sadder observer:
“Rather
than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And
beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing,
and is nowhere, and is endless.”
The
poem is about expectations and their delusory nature. The young are filled with
hope, and should be, and who are we to take it from them? With little basis in
the text, I’ve always read the final stanza as set in a church sanctuary. “High
Windows” is not about sex after all. It confirms what Dr. Johnson wrote in The Rambler #2, published on this date,
March 24, in 1750: “The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure
to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”
1 comment:
Larkin is my poet laureate of nostalgia--unsparing, unsentimental nostalgia.
I have always read this poem the same way I read "This Be the Verse". The young, in one another's arms, as Yeats more delicately put it, are a different breed from the aged who are/were a different breed from their parents, those Victorian fools.
Larkin looks at the young people and reflects that the older generation once looked at him and perhaps envied his freedom from institutional religion. The old are filled with a certain bitterness that the young have it much easier than the old once did. And so it goes, back to the beginning. Like you, I've always read the "high windows" as placing the setting in a church, the more so as it follows the reflection about the older people feeling bitter about enforced religion.
I really like "At Grass," "MCMXIV", "Churchgoing," and "An Arundel Tomb".
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